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Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

The “if you’re straight and white and normal” sure doesn’t track with my experience. I’m a software engineer in Overland Park, Kansas, and live in a middle class neighborhood in the suburbs. Cows a mile one way and IKEA the other way. It’s the “American Dream” town, and it’s MORE diverse than when I lived in the city. My neighbors are Indian and Jordanian, Kenyan, Chinese, Vietnamese, Pakistani, African American, Caucasian (some from US, some from other countries). I bought this house from a Nepalese couple based on their names.

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... Overland Park is 82% White[0]. It's one of the wealthiest white suburbs of Kansas City, and has been for decades.

I appreciate your experience is different than the statistics, but it's quite literally less diverse than the US as a whole, and less than Minneapolis and many other midwestern cities.

[0]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/overlandparkcitykansas

Agreed. Anecdotal evidence coming from a suburb of a large city says absolutely nothing about diversity living in the rest of the US.

Okay but the grandparent seemed to be stating that enjoying living in a place like this in the Midwest requires being white and straight. I think the main thing my neighbors all have in common is they have children and work professional middle class jobs.

Also, I likely see the younger people, there are quite a few old people who retire in OP. The blue valley school districts have a makeup that skews fewer whites (70%) versus a place like San Francisco where whites apparently send their children to private schools rather than public schools. So in terms of actually raising children to meet people who are different than them, it seems like the Midwest is a clear winner. Despite whites making up 40% of the population of San Francisco, only 20% of the enrolled students are white.

> the grandparent seemed to be stating that enjoying living in a place like this in the Midwest requires being white and straight

I don't think they meant that you can't own a house and lead a nice life if you're not straight and white. I think they just meant to say it's difficult to 'fit into' Midwestern culture if you don't fall into certain identity categories. While I'm from the Midwest and have fondness in my heart for it, I have to concede this is true from experience.

Overland Park is a part of Johnson County, KS which has a part in the history of segregation in the greater Kansas City area. [0]

[0]: https://shawneemissionpost.com/2020/08/18/johnson-countys-re...

From a quick look at what DDG feeds me, Overland Park is a nice Kansas City suburb. With a bunch of higher education institutions. And a botanical garden! This place seems like a midwestern outlier.

The town I grew up in (unnamed Iowa) now offers to pay remote workers to move there. The town has declined since I remember it in the 1980s as a fortune 500 factory town with a population of about 15,000. It has never had a botanical garden. It was always safest to be white, straight, and normie in whatever way possible if you have to be there.

Wonder how Dubuque is doing post IBM.

This is absolutely not the experience if you live in Wisconsin. Well over 80% of people here are white.

Because it's full of German immigrants. Do you want them to hate themselves because they're a specific skin color?

Would you say something similar about people's skin color if you went to Nigeria?

What's your point with a comment like this? Yes America is majority white and those percentages are higher in some areas. It's not a problem.

He's just saying that the Midwest (eg. Wisconsin) is not generally as diverse as Overland Park, which is true. You should examine what made you react so strongly to this.

You should probably examine the comment at the top of the chain he/she responded to and think it over a little harder.

The point is that people make generalizations that they don't realize based on their personal experience. For example, I can make tons of generalization about how nice India is for tourists as an Indian (I currently live in America but travel back for family and as a tourist occasionally) but someone who's white might not share that same experience because they might be hounded by scammers and people looking to make a quick buck off of an unsuspecting foreigner.

Similarly, cities and people in the midwest might be great if you're straight, white, and "normal" but that might not be true for everyone. Will people be as welcoming if they see you as an outsider? Maybe. I try to keep an open mind but I also can't be 100% sure.

Oh ok so if I were to say San Francisco might be livable "if you're gay and black and "abnormal" this would be acceptable?

Just a quip here there really aren’t a lot of black people in San Francisco. It’s pretty noticeable coming from Columbus.

Yes but people don't care about Asians because they're white adjacent now. You're right though I had way more interactions with black people when I lived in the midwest.

Well, now you're just making things up because everyone knows that San Francisco isn't livable for anyone.

Same stat likely applies to Kansas. The closest comparison to Overland Park would be some suburb of Milwaukee. I guarantee Milwaukee area diversity is higher than Wisconsin as a whole.

If by diversity you mean segregated:

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2019/01/...

like almost every other state in America, Wisconsin is majority white unless you’re in the cities. Milwaukee is majority minority. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Americans

Milwaukee is the only city like that. Both Madison and Green Bay (#2 and #3 largest cities by population) are 75-80% white too.

I'm not trying to make any commentary on that, I'm just citing statistics and my observations.

Milwaukee is also the most segregated city in the country.

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2019/01/...

I'm currently in JoCo as well and my subdivision is much, much less diverse than my previous home within Kansas City city limits. My son's school is 80% white, 99% non-economically-disadvantaged, 93% students without disabilities. It's not representative of my past life experiences in KC, Boston, SF, Seattle, or SoCal.

> 99% non-economically-disadvantaged

That is a really long way of saying “not poor”.

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